Pre-production has wrapped. It has been a good two weeks, I feel like I have got a lot of good work done, and have a solid foundation to start production next week. I had my schedule for pre-production and whilst I largely stuck to it, there were some changes I had to make. Some of these changes were unavoidable, such as being called into work and thus not being able to work on the game for some of the hours I had allotted. Others were errors that I made in the order in which I placed tasks. For example, it wasn't the best idea to put 'Create core gameplay loop' before I had figured out the main mechanics of my game. This is the main lesson I have learnt from my first pre-production, that I need to carefully consider the order in which I am placing things on the schedule. Also I have generally learnt some of the things that take more or less time than I originally thought.
I have filled in the six weeks of production in the schedule, and I have included milestones in there such as 'Level Generation' or 'Story Complete'. I expect that some things will move around and some things will take more or less time that I allotted, as is par for the course on my first production. However I have covered all of the bases, everything I need to do is in there, and I have left post-production free so that I can assess which areas of the game need polish at that time.
In my production schedule I have also included weekly progress reviews. These will come in the form of blog posts where I will detail the tasks I have done that week, and how I fared in sticking to the schedule. This will help me to understand how my game is developing, by taking a step back out of the minutia each week to look at the overall project's progress, and also will make it easier for me to see how the production schedule is going: do I need to work over the weekend to catch up? Do I need to move things around to give certain tasks more time to complete? Am I ahead of schedule and if so how can I maximise the use of my spare time? These progress reviews are very important to the process in making sure I am using my time efficiently.
Here is a link to my production schedule.
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